In The Dream
by pazu7
Summary: A poetic speculation on the time between Monica's first death and her last. This story is available in audio format at my homepage.


_**In the Dream**_

_A poetic interlude by  
Bryan Harrison  
based on characters from the film  
**Artificial Intelligence**_

_**1**_

In the dream she can fly. So she dreams and she flies as often as permitted by those whose worldly concerns so often bind her.

She flies out over her confinement, far above the city and the oppressive building in which she habits, surrounded by those who have taken her and who keep her bound to the world and earthly concerns in a haze of chemicals and electronic gadgetry. All of these arrangements are centered on the monitory transactions with he that is all that's left to her here. He is of course concerned with all of the matters that are beneath her now; behind her. Financial arrangements, insurance and the like. She has transcended these things, but of that transcendence he is as yet unaware.

She is breathing still, corporal, so these concerns loom around her like shadows cast by impatient specters pacing to and fro and to and fro, until their passage is a constant blur against the backdrop of her fleeting moments of freedom.

She cares not.

But there is one issue that she yet wishes to reconcile. Perhaps before the time her wings loose her for the last time from this place. Yet there is no avenue for such reconciliation to manifest. That grey thought alone ends her dream flight for now and she sighs, once again earthbound and weary, staring stupidly at the woman with the needles and calm innocuous whispers, who sits at her beside and then speaks to someone out of her line of sight… (_"you can talk to her now_") before moving onto other places in the room.

In a state of dreary cognizance, in the grasp of this place she has so longed to leave behind, there is once again the onslaught of memories that issue like rank odors from the darkness in which her troubled past ever taunts and rips at her wings. A face is pressed into that dark place. A little face, helpless and confused, diminishing into the reflections of shadows (_don't look back!_) in a forest of conflicting emotions. (_but she looks back_) His head fell to one side then, so long ago, in resignation; defeat. An image that has burned itself into her soul, imprinting a foul shape there, asymmetrical, abominable to her spirit, chanting a dischorus atonal through the empty halls of all her years alone.

"Mom," someone says. She knows this face. Oh yes. It is the boy. He is not a boy. Anymore. She smiles and says his name aloud. But he only frowns a sad reflection, and his face, now a man's face closes a moment.

"No," he replies "No Mom, it's Martin." He sat her up, to bring to her lips a cup of his offering. "Drink, Mom," and she heard in that sound some of the tears that he must have tendered in his dark moments between their meetings.

She drinks slowly, savoring this taste; this time, which they both know is short; each having a different assessment of this knowledge. Each sharing a weariness born of different emotions.

When she is finished she smiles again. "Of course," she admits, "Martin. Of course. Where is your father? You know I told him to make sure he put that…" but she then recalls the nature of his absence and chuckles. "Oh yes. Yes." When she looked up again his face was wet and a thousand miles away. She reached across that space and saw her hands, old now, withered and wrinkled with a million unspoken regrets, cup his face, always her son's face, and the distance shrinks for one last time as she leans forward to kiss him softly.

"Ok, Mom, I just wanted to stop by and see you. Everybody misses you. Ellen couldn't come, work and all, but she sends her best wishes and little Gracie is getting better. She wants her grammars to come home and visit and…" but he cannot finish for her kiss has explained to him the distance at which she hovers from his world and his face breaks finally into the face of the other little boy she left behind so long ago. His tears are a man's tears now. He will savor them in the darkness. Alone.

"I'm sorry," is what she wanted to say. Something came out of her, some sound, she was sure. She hoped it was what he needed to hear.

The woman with the needles has returned, blessedly without her needles. She whispers something (_"Tired. Sleep now"_) and the boy gone man, is gone soon after.

It is time to dream again.

And fly.

So she flies out over the building watching as the man her son has become leaves, stepping quickly to beat the emotion building inside his shielded heart. Then pausing by his vehicle to kneel and release the anguish he has kept silent for so long. She cannot hear his voice but she knows what it is he will cry. It is the word they all abandon, but which was the seat of their being when they first learned to crawl and shape their world around them. It is what all sons cry in those grey moments when their first love; their primordial love is known to be moving beyond them as they once moved beyond her.

"Mommy" is what he will be saying. Just as he cried "Daddy" so many years ago.

A sound disturbs her suddenly, a beeping. Voices are raised and bustling in the invisible places at the periphery of her hearing. She watches a woman; a nurse, run into the parking lot to retrieve her son. They share excited whispers and then race back into the building.

But these matters are beneath her now, behind her.

_"Monica,"_ someone called. A gentle voice, familiar yet unstrained, none of the anxiety is there, as was in life. She turned to see his glowing face floating angelic and impossible against the density of stars that sparkled with a new secret light. A happiness came upon her heart then. One she had never known before.

_"It's time,"_ he said.

The anxious sounds of her desperate resuscitation are left behind, muffled in the folds of the cloak she has let fall to the ground beneath, like an old skin to wither again into the dust from whence it came.

She flies now. Not alone anymore.

**2**

_It has withered away now; the home in the world she once knew. _

_Immersed in the joyous stream beyond that world, no longer confined or defined by those unforgiving limitations, she is more than "she". Clothed in the subtle fabric of an eternal continuance she has witnessed the beginning and end of all things matter. For it is not in time that such things occur in her new home; in the stream, but only in that 'now' in which all duration resides. _

_Universes shape and collide, dispersing within time and shaping time in their wake; she has seen this and laughed light-speed and beyond in the ebb and flow of this conscious stream, she hears and sings with it; it's audible expression both enveloping and flowing through all things of which she is now, at once, in and of._

_There are really no words for such being._

_Another came, seemingly at once, passing the cruder states to know the truth of things. She formed to greet him then; formed as he knew her before, and he cast away his shell of logic and fear to laugh with her. She called him "son" once as she called another "husband", and there are those who were known by other definitions, though all such things are past. Their collective memories of the world are a vision shared without judgment across the breadth of the stream, and forgiven in this home to all mercy, the Ocean of such, and Love._

_She has not forgotten that face that burned her so in the world of forms and the passions they spawn. But it is behind her, as all such matters have been left._

_Yet a calling has arrived. A rift in the stream, it forms a whirl in that fabric called space/time by those yet relegated to its domain; perhaps ever so, for they are of a design specific to that place._

_They have delved into its secret portals and witnessed from afar, in spectrograph, this eternal field of play. They wonder at it, awed at this being. They have sought out understanding in the depths of that trace called 'history' and have extracted from their endeavors a treasure of finds._

_A boy. A boy who is not a boy._

_It is through the mechanics of that world's design that she has been called. The rift has grown and a longing familiar and yet new has reached out from that disturbed place to beckon her. And she followed that call, slipping with no hesitation into that whirl, donning once again the cloak of definitions in which the course of time has passed her by. Such passions dwell here, passions that would ever seek resolution to the conflicts of her discarded history. She is engulfed in the darkness of tattered memories as she falls into this realm. It is an unintentional mercy that she cannot recall the circumstances that have brought her back to this place. The deciphered code of her device here was written in the time before these events occurred and she will don the skin from that time. _

_The stream flows on, unaffected by her departure. She will be back. All come back._

_**3**_

Her dream seemed like clouds passing at some distance and muffled noises out of her line of sight. There was something before, a backdrop of activity in some unrecognizable expanse. Some constant motion that she cannot recall the nature of. It has passed.

"_I found you."_

She opened her eyes and saw him again for the first time; for the first time with her new eyes. She remembers him. He is washed in gold light and his eyes are mysterious upon her.

Why does he cry?

"Hi," is what she replied after awakening from forever.

And thus their new and final day here began.

There was no Martin.

There was no Henry.

There was no grief.

And it was the happiest day she could recall in this place.

At the close of this beautiful day, she slipped between her warm sheets still not recalling the events that fated this reunion. He knelt beside her. She gazed at him feeling in her depths that they have reconciled something but in this cloak of flesh it is lost to her, faded against a backdrop of ancience; irrelevant in his forgiving.

At last she knows it is love that she sees there in his eyes. Yes, love. And it is real.

"I love you," she told him as she reached to embrace him; her faithful boy, feeling his warmth against her; repeating this pronouncement at the caresses of his tears against her face.

She had always loved him.

_**4**_

_In the stream they dwell now, his new and special light ever in orbit around hers. Universes shape and collide, dispersing into the infinite waters of the stream of life, and they witness this all, laughing together, for always… _

…_now and forever at play in the dream of being._


End file.
